Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers

ITAMAR, West Bank — It was close to midnight on Saturday when the bodies of five members of the Fogel family were removed from their home in this Jewish settlement in the hills of the northern West Bank, more than 24 hours after intruders, suspected to be Palestinians, stabbed them to death in their sleep.

The bodies were brought out in order of age — first the parents, Udi, 36, and Ruth, 35, then the three children, Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, a baby girl of 3 months. They were the victims of the deadliest attack inside a settlement in years.

“They slaughtered them, really slaughtered them,” said Avichai Ronsky, a former chief rabbi of the Israeli military and a resident of Itamar, outside the house of the victims on Saturday night.

The killers appeared to have randomly picked the house, one of a neat row of identical one-story homes at the edge of the settlement, on a rocky incline overlooking the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta — the proximity underlining the visceral nature of the contest in this area between Jewish settlers and Palestinians over the land.

The Israeli military was combing the Palestinian villages around Itamar, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, on Saturday, searching for at least two intruders who fled the settlement after the attack on Friday night.

“Rest assured, we are on a hunt after those responsible,” said Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi, the chief of the military’s Central Command, which is in charge of security in the West Bank. “We will find them.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pointed a finger at the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, blaming it for what he described as incitement in the schools, the mosques and the news media it controls.

“The time has come to stop this double-speak in which the Palestinian Authority outwardly talks peace and allows — and sometimes leads — incitement at home,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a broadcast statement on Saturday night.

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The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, phoned Mr. Netanyahu to express his sorrow over the killings on Saturday evening, according to a statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office. Earlier, Mr. Netanyahu had said he was “disappointed by the weak and mumbled statements” from the Palestinian side, adding, “This is not how one condemns terrorism.”

Mr. Abbas did not issue any public condemnation on Saturday, though the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, condemned the attack. “There ought to be no doubt as to where we stand on violence,” he said. “We reject it, and we always condemned it.”

Palestinians have often justified the killing of Israeli civilians, especially settlers, as a legitimate response to the Israeli occupation of territory conquered in the 1967 war, or in the case of radicals, as part of a broader struggle against Israel’s existence.

Itamar, a religious Jewish settlement of 150 families, was closed to reporters until after sundown on Saturday because of the investigation, and because the Orthodox residents wanted to prevent unnecessary violations of the rules of the Sabbath.

Residents said the victims were discovered by the family’s 12-year-old daughter, Tamar, who had returned home around midnight on Friday from a meeting of her youth group. Two more of the family’s children, ages 8 and 2, survived the attack. They were sleeping in a separate bedroom.

Although attacks on Israelis in the West Bank have become less frequent in recent years, four Israeli civilians — two men and two women who lived in the Beit Hagai settlement — were shot dead in August while driving near Kiryat Arba in the southern West Bank. Itamar has also been the scene of several bloody attacks in the past.

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2011, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe